"Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle." - Plato

A little while ago, I was driving through downtown Toronto when I came to a red light.  
As I was sitting there, thinking about how much I hate Toronto traffic, I noticed a man walking down the sidewalk. There were lots of people walking down the sidewalk, but the reason I noticed this man was because of the way he was walking. This man was limping slowly, step by step to a destination unknown to me. Every step he took seemed as though it required all of the effort he had. I looked at his face and I saw worry and frustration.

He got about 10 feet and then stopped to rest, placing himself up against a wall for support. 

When I saw this, I thought about how frustrating that must be; to be trying to get where you going so slowly. I saw this and I had to ask myself questions about this man:

Where was he going?

How long would it take for him to get there?

Does he ever feel like giving up?

If you were to look around your school, your community, or your work you'd see the people who have those struggles every day.

But sometimes you don't. Sometimes the struggle isn't as apparent as a man limping down the street. Sometimes that struggle is on the inside. That's a lot harder to notice. That takes a little bit more awareness and understanding.

It's all too easy to go through our day to day lives not really paying much attention to what's going on around us. It can be easy to walk through the halls of a school and not notice the girl who is standing by her locker by herself, hoping that no one notices her or the guy who seems to be the joker and is always laughing but goes home to an abusive parent.

When we start to be more aware of what’s going on around us we begin to see a lot.

Watching that man as he worked so hard to get to where ever it was that he was going started to really make me think about the struggles we have in our own lives. To think about how hard, frustrating and tiring it can be to try to deal with them yet feel like we’re never getting anywhere. To feel as though that man may have felt as he tried so hard just to get home so that he could rest.

We all fight battles. We all struggle. For some of us, those struggles are visible. If a person has a physical disability, we see that. We’re able to do something to help that person. That’s the choice we have as young people – we have the choice to help one another through the hard stuff. But, like a lot of us, myself included, what’s difficult is when we can’t see the struggles of other people; when we can’t help because we don’t know.

What’s hard is when we struggle within ourselves to be better, to be happier, to succeed, yet nobody knows that we’re struggling because we hide it. I hid my personal challenges really well when I was younger. I got really good at hiding what was really going on within me from other people at school. A lot of the time I did that through using humour and by making people laugh. If I could make people laugh, they wouldn’t think that I had any problems.

Eventually that caught up to me. When I got to University, I couldn’t handle the stress that I had. I started to lose my battle. I got to a place where I felt overwhelmed and helpless – like nothing would get better.

Then I began to learn strategies to help me with that - tools that I could use so that I controlled my thoughts and they didn’t control me.

It’s estimated that 15%-20% (1 in 5) of young people in Canada, at any given time, battle with depression. That means that for a school with a population of 800, 120 of those students are dealing with this right now. (source: Canadian Council of Learning http://www.ccl-cca.ca/ccl)

Anxiety disorders, something that I dealt with personally, are the most common mental health problem in children and youth (http://www.kidsmentalhealth.ca/). Anxiety is a normal reaction to stress. We can’t go through life without feeling stressed. What we can do though, is learn ways to deal with that kind of stress so that we can be our best in our most difficult moments.

Some ways we can start to deal with the stress and struggles we have in our lives:

Stop - Take yourself out of the situation that's triggering you. Whether you do this physically (by leaving) or mentally (by focusing on something else - such as counting backward from 100 by 3's) the point is to disengage so that you can re-engage.

Oxygenate - Take 5 deep breathes. Research shows that when you increase the oxygen to your brain, you help slow down the chemical flood that's happening and is causing you to become hijacked.

Strengthen Appreciation- Our brain doesn't distinguish between what's real and what we believe to be real. It's the reason you can have an argument in your head with someone and make yourself upset...without them actually being there. By focusing on the positive things you have in your life (your friends, family, a pet, a place you've visited) you create what's called a "gratitude anchor". Powerful stuff!

Seek More Info - It's easy to make conclusions without having all the information. Some helpful questions to ask ourselves include "what info am I still missing"" or "What is that other person going through right now?" By taking the time to think about the situation a bit more you're allowing yourself more time to self-calm, engage your thinking brain, and practice empathy.

If you want to learn more about this, make sure to check out www.ihhp.com/youth

Keep Rockin'

By Matt Tod
Leadership Rewired!
INSTITUTE for HEALTH and HUMAN POTENTIAL